Blekko (self-styled as lowercase blekko[2]) is a web search engine whose goal is to provide better search results than those offered by Google Search, by offering results culled from a set of 3 billion trusted websites and excluding material from such sites as content farms. The site, launched to the public on November 1, 2010, uses slashtags to provide results for common searches.
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The company was co-founded by Rich Skrenta in 2007, who had created Newhoo, which was ultimately acquired by Netscape and renamed as the Open Directory Project.[3] Blekko has raised $24 million in venture capital from such individuals as Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway, as well as from U.S. Venture Partners and CMEA Capital.[4] The company's goal was to be able to provide useful search results without the extraneous links often provided by Google. Individuals who enter searches for such frequently searched categories as cars, finance, health and hotels will receive results prescreened by Blekko editors who will use what The New York Times described as "Wikipedia-style policing" to weed out pages created by content farms and focus on results from professionals.[5] Use of slashtags will restrict the set of search results to those matching the specified characteristic and a slashtag will be automatically added for search categories with prescreened results.[6] Queries related to personal health are limited to a prescreened list of 76 sites that Blekko editors have determined to be trustworthy, excluding many sites that rank highly in Google searches.[3] As of Blekko's launch date, its 8,000 beta editors had developed 3,000 slashtags corresponding to the site's most frequent searches.[6] The company hopes to use editors to develop prepared lists of the 50 sites that best match its 100,000 most frequent search targets.[3] Additional tools built into Blekko allow users to see the IP address that a website is running on and let registered users label a site as spam.[7]Blekko plans to earn revenue by selling ads based on slashtags and search results. Blekko plans to provide data on its algorithm for ranking search results, including details for inbound links to specific sites.[5]
The following "web search bill of rights" was publicized by Blekko: "search shall be open", "search results shall involve people", "ranking data shall not be kept secret", "web data shall be readily available", "there is no one-size-fits-all for search", "advanced search shall be accessible", "search engine tools shall be open to all", "search and community go hand-in-hand", "spam does not belong in search results", "privacy of searchers shall not be violated". One writer referred to it as "what we assume is a poke at Google."[8][9]
In 2011, Blekko announced blocking "content farmy sites", to reduce spam, in line with its bill of rights.[10]
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